College Democrat Desecrates Crosses with Graffiti and Condoms, University Yawns

John McCormack

Crosses used in an antiabortion demonstration at George Washington University were defaced last week, and the school's College Democrats organization has apologized for the vandalism.

The crosses had been stored in a locked office shared by College Republicans and College Democrats. The Democrats issued a statement saying one of their members had admitted responsibility and had been expelled from the group but did not name the alleged offender.

GWU's chapter of the Young America's Foundation, a conservative group, had planted 1,100 small white crosses on university grounds on the anniversary of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Student Republicans later found drawings and writing in black ink on some of the crosses. One depicted a stick figure of a crucified Jesus. Another, hung upside down, had a condom stretched over it. One had the name of a College Democrats leader.

Students at George Washington University awoke the morning of October 8 to a campus blanketed in posters that blared, "HATE MUSLIMS? SO DO WE!!!" The posters depicted a "typical Muslim" with "lasers in eyes," "venom from mouth," a "suicide vest," and a "peg leg for smuggling children and heroin," and purported to be an advertisement for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, an event Young America's Foundation in conjunction with David Horowitz's Freedom Center is hosting at GW and campuses around the country to bring attention to the threat of radical Islam.

Before you could say hate crime! the president of the YAF chapter had been asked by a university bureaucrat to sign a letter condemning hate speech, and was summarily dragged before a "peace forum" where he was booed and hissed by 100 of his inquisitor-classmates for suggesting, while he defended his group, that a minority of Muslims, however small, support radicalism and terrorism. Just as quickly, the story of an anti-Muslim hate crime at GW popped up on IslamOnline.net and reached papers as far away as India and Pakistan. Steven Knapp, president of the Washington, D.C., university, issued a statement: "We do not condone, and we will not tolerate, the dissemination of fliers or other documents that vilify any religious, ethnic, or racial group."